Tag
Violence
-
The Treachery of Machine Realism
“The bombed elementary school in Iran appears to have become a target thanks to satellite imaging. In this case, what the image represented — and to who — was a matter of life and death.”
-
The Body Always Remembers
In a recent article in the Atlantic, Leslie Jamison discusses the memoirist’s responsibility to investigate the events of his or her past on the page rather than merely confess to them.1 She writes, “This notion of investigation offers an alternative to confession … To put the ‘I’ to work this way invites a different intimacy—not…
-
Love and Death in Indian Country
At its core, David Treuer’s latest novel is a tale of unrequited love and random violence. The stuff of melodrama, to be sure, but in Treuer’s skillful, multi-vocal telling, neither love nor death appears sensational or simple. Treuer, an Ojibwa writer from northern Minnesota, is the author of three other novels, a controversial work of…
-
Canine Control
Kornél Mundruczó’s White God has one of those premises that feels unique but also strangely inevitable: a mixed-breed dog named Hagen, abused by everyone except the 13-year-old girl who loved him, decides he’s had enough and leads a bloody revolution against humankind. We glimpse, in the opening scene, his canine army swarming the streets of Budapest—a…
-
“It’s When There Are a Lot of Them That There Are Problems”
The sorrow and outrage provoked by the attacks on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo were underwritten by an all-too-familiar grand narrative: These were not the cowardly misdeeds of a group of disaffected and delusional youth; this was another instantiation of a primeval war of civilizations extending far beyond the Île-de-France. Accordingly, grandiose statements about…
-
Marlon James’s Savage Business
The irony in the title of Marlon James’s new novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings, is twofold. For one, this 686-page book is far from brief. On the contrary, it is a raucous, nearly …
-
Kids in Cages
In June 2011, the State of California permanently shut down the Preston Youth Correctional Facility, a reform school for orphans and juvenile offenders that had been in operation for over a century. Since its inception in 1894, the school saw the rise and fall of variously strict, benevolent, neglectful, and sadistic regimes, all engaged in…
-
Enrigue’s Backspin
Four-fifths of the way through Álvaro Enrigue’s Muerte súbita (Sudden Death), the narrator admits that he doesn’t know what the book is about. It’s not about the birth of tennis as a popular sport. Nor is it about the European conquest of the Americas, or about the Counter-Reformation. It’s more a book about how one…
-
Paris Streets, January 11, 2015
An estimated 3.7 million people rallied across France this past Sunday, January 11th. Roughly 1.6 million marchers were in Paris, where the Charlie Hebdo murders occurred. Friends report that the route was so impossibly crowded that people spread into nearby streets to create a slow river moving from Place de la Republique to Place de…
